


impossible future

by thekatriarch



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-02-01 02:43:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21341377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekatriarch/pseuds/thekatriarch
Summary: Imagine them like this: on their knees, arms around each other, eyes closed, kneeling in the surf at the place where the ocean meets the shore. Not so long ago, the sky was blue and cloudless, but now it blazes with light so strong it hurts their eyes. The little waves that lap against their legs are still cool, for now, but pretty soon they will boil; pretty soon the ocean will boil dry.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	impossible future

_ all roads lead toward _ _the same blocked intersection_

-The Mountain Goats, "Sax Rohmer, Pt. 1"

They say that in the moments just before you die, you relive certain memories, that you replay your life again from the beginning. But he doesn’t see his past. What he sees is the future: not the future as it will be, which is something that he’ll never know, but futures that might have been, if things were different. Futures that he never would have guessed that he wanted if he hadn’t met her; futures that he’s not sure that he does want after all, but futures that might have been possible, if he weren't dying.

But he _ is _ dying.

There’s no way to escape that. He’s dying, and so is she.

She is the center of all of the impossible futures that flit through his mind like insubstantial little ghosts. Better not to think of them, because there is no future; not for them. 

Imagine them like this: on their knees, arms around each other, eyes closed, kneeling in the surf at the place where the ocean meets the shore. Not so long ago, the sky was blue and cloudless, but now it blazes with light so strong it hurts their eyes. The little waves that lap against their legs are still cool, for now, but pretty soon they will boil; pretty soon the ocean will boil dry. 

It’s a beautiful place, a good place to die. He stumbled this far, let her carry him this far, and could go no further. His body is broken; he is bleeding internally; he is dying. He would be dying anyway, even if they could stop the terrible thing that is happening, the terrible thing that is tearing the sky apart, which will boil the sea, which will devour their bodies. This will be a faster death, which is a small mercy, maybe.

All of this will be gone soon: the two of them and their bodies, the beach, even the ocean, which, if you could look at it closely, if you weren’t blinded by the brightness of the weapon which has lit the world up, you would see is beginning to evaporate. Everything that is here now will not be here soon; will not be anywhere. Their future is only a minute. Maybe two.

Until today, the future never seemed relevant, or possible. He never thought further ahead than the current mission: a day or two, a few weeks, six months. The future was for politicians, for strategists, for people who thought they would live to see it. He never expected to live that long; never even bothered to hope for it. He saved his hope for other people. But something’s changed in the last few days; something inside him has cracked open, so now that death has finally caught up with him, he’s not ready. Not ready the way he was ready before he met her.

For years, he wanted to live only because he had work to do, a mission to fulfill. Responsibilities he took on himself to secure a future that he never planned to see. A future for other people to live in.

Now he wants to live the way every living thing wants to live.

What’s changed is that he met her, that he’s seen something in her that speaks to something in him, some feral, desperate thing in both of them that recognizes itself in the other. It has opened something he thought was long closed, something which drove him here, against orders, to attempt the impossible. When he fell and his body hit the floor, his death was written. He might have stayed there and waited to die, let the pain carry him away into unconsciousness. Instead he stood up. He came to find her, to finish what they started.

Now they will die together, which is better than dying alone. Everything else will die, too: this beach, this ocean, the palm trees, everything they can see, or everything they _ could _ see, if they opened their eyes, but they don’t. They keep their eyes closed, but the sky is so bright it burns even through their eyelids. If you could bear to look at it, it would be beautiful.

In a moment they will be dust; they will be less than dust. They will be nothing.

But he sees these futures playing out in front of him: futures where, somehow, they survive the next two minutes, and they get off this planet and his organs don’t fail and he doesn’t bleed to death, but they go on embracing like they are right now, and he is still a spy and she is still a criminal but neither of them is alone like they’ve both always been alone. It’s a future where something else is possible: companionship, or — go on and say it — love. 

Here is one impossibility: they make their way back to the rebel base, with the plans that they have died to secure, and the weakness that her father promised her was there really is there, and this is the last time the weapon ever fires, because their people destroy it, and she sits nearby and watches him float in the bacta tank, not thinking of anything in particular, and when they move him to a bed she sits there by his bedside and waits for him to wake up. When he does wake up, at last, she kisses his face and tells him that their mission succeeded, against all odds, and that they are alive, and that she loves him. When he is well again, they go on fighting together; he can’t imagine what that would look like or how it would work, but it’s what they both want, so they find a way to make it work. They are a good team; together they have already done one impossible thing, haven’t they? He hopes so, but he’ll never know for sure.

There are even more impossible futures, where after they impossibly survive and impossibly escape, he finds some other calling; futures where he tells the truth more often than he lies, where he never again has to shoot someone who trusts him in the back; futures where they marry, where they have children; futures where they grow old and die the way free people die, the way normal people die. Not like this. Please. Not like this.

Here is what will really happen: they will die, but their mission will succeed. Even now, the plans they have died to transmit to the fleet are being downloaded onto a small card, and the card is being raced through corridors and it will land in the hands of a nineteen-year-old girl who is on her way to a distant, dusty planet on the edge of the galaxy. She will be captured, but miraculously, in a series of coincidences too enormous to be mere coincidence, the data will find its way into the hands of the man she tried to get it to, and he will try to deliver it where she told him to deliver it. The weapon will fire again, like it is firing now, and an entire world, an entire civilization will be lost forever. But the girl will escape, and the plans will be found, and the weapon will be destroyed. All of this is impossible; it is at least as unlikely as the impossible futures that run through his mind in the moments before he dies. The future is always impossible, but somehow, it happens anyway.

Even if they could escape the next two minutes with their bodies intact; if they could find their way off this planet, which they never possibly could; if they could get to a medical facility and heal his injuries before he dies from them; even then these futures would be improbable. Neither of them knows how to love another person. Neither of them has any practice with loving another person, or with being loved. Loving someone means opening yourself up to the possibility of pain, to the possibility that you will not be loved in return; it means confessing that you _ want _ to be loved; it means asking someone to love you. It requires honesty, which neither of them is good at, and vulnerability, which is even harder. It means letting yourself be seen, and be known. It means surrendering your weapons, which have always kept you safe. The hardest, most terrifying thing in the world is to let someone love you. A synonym for “vulnerable” is “unsafe."

There is no safe way to love someone; there is always risk involved. 

He would try to love her without risking anything, without letting her see him. She would do the same. They would want, and be afraid of wanting, afraid of admitting that they want anything, let alone love, because wanting love feels so much like weakness. They would run away from each other, because running is easier, running feels safer than letting someone love you. Safer than admitting that you want them to love you. Safer than admitting that you are afraid they will leave you first. _ I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad. _

The truth is, they’ve only known each other for a few days. There are so many ways that love can go wrong. But why dwell on that now? Why not believe that they would find a way? Why not imagine them happy, against all odds? So maybe he would run, or she would, but maybe they would find themselves returning to each other, called back by that thing they each see in the other: that nameless wild hunger that brought them together. Imagine them like that: returning to each other, the way these waves return to the shore, again and again, until the water evaporates and the shore disintegrates, which is going to happen, is about to happen, and here they are, these broken children, holding each other at the end of the world. _Welcome home._


End file.
